Health Choices Commissioner

The left certainly likes to give the right of privacy at least lip service as they tell you what you should be concerned with concerning government. But when it concerns something they want, privacy isn’t such an important right.

HR 3200, the infamous house health care insurance bill apparently proves that point quite handily. Nestled within its 1,000 plus pages is a provision, on top of all the other provisions noted previously, that should give real privacy rights advocates pause:

Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and “other information as is prescribed by” regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for “affordability credits.”

Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details — there’s no specified limit on what’s available or unavailable — to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify “affordability credits.”

Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a “low-income prescription drug subsidy” but has not applied for it.

Of course the Privacy Act, that inconvenient law that requires agencies to get information not from other agencies but from the individual, is being pointedly ignored here. In fact, reading above, you’d think our “lawmakers” were completely unaware of their own laws.

Given most of them haven’t even read the bill, you’d be exactly right. Additionally, we find out that not all health care insurance reform is contained in the pending versions of health care insurance legislation:

A better candidate for a future privacy crisis is the so-called stimulus bill enacted with limited debate early this year. It mandated the “utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014,” but included only limited privacy protections.

That’s right – already passed into law, in the “stimulus” bill, and without any debate, is a mandate for the use of electronic health records.

Sound like “representative government” at work for you? Or does it sound like an increasingly intrusive government discarding your privacy for the sake of its own hoped for efficiency? Not that such access will provide a more efficient bureaucracy, but it sure will provide that bureaucracy with almost unlimited access to tax information about you and your family.

And that’s without ever getting into what this “Health Choices Commissar Commissioner” is supposed to do. Wouldn’t Orwell have a field day with all of this?